The red, yellow and orange wall began to advance with the breeze from the sea, engulfing new huts every few seconds. It was heading directly toward me, at a slow walking pace, incinerating everything that stood in its path. Explosions thundered in the blaze – one, two, another. I realized, at last, that they were kerosene stoves. Every one of the seven thousand huts had a stove. Those that were pumped up and under pressure were exploding when the flames reached them. The last monsoon rain had fallen weeks before. The slum was a huge pile of tinder-dry kindling, and a strengthening sea breeze fanned the flames through a whole acre of fuel and human lives.

Slums are planless, organic dispersements. There’s purpose in the narrow, twisting lanes, but no order . . . running, staggering, and bumping along the lane . . . was a constant file of people moving away from the fire. They were helping the elderly and herding the children. Some carried possessions – clothes, cooking pots, stoves, and cardboard boxes of documents. Many of them were injured, showing cuts, bloody wounds, and serious burns. The smell of bruning plastic, fuel, clothes, hair and flesh was acrid and unnerving.

I discovered later that every household, my own included, was rationed to two or three buckets of water per day for all cooking, drinking, and washing needs. The slum-dwellers were trying to put the fire out with their drinking water. Every bucket thrown, and there were many, forced one more

household to spend a thirsty night, waiting for the morning delivery of water in city council trucks.We couldn’t hope to put the fire out with our wet rags. Our role was to gain time for the demolition teams scrambling to remove endangered huts. It was heartbreaking work. They were saving the slum by destroying their own houses. And to gain time for those wrecking teams, Qasim sent us left and

right in desperate chess moves, starving the fire, and slowly winning ground.

In the end, when we’d made our last sweet through the scorched lanes and charred lumps of houses, looking for survivors and counting the dead, we stood together in mournful assembly to hear the tally. IT was known that twelve persons were dead, six of them elderly men and women, and four of them children. More than one hundred were injured, with burns and cuts. Many of them were serious wounds. About six hundred houses were lost – one-tenth of the slum.

“Damn lucky!” Prabaker summed up cheerfully. . . ‘Last year, in the last big fire, a full one-third of the zhopadpatti was burning up. One house from every three houses! More than two thousand houses gone! Kalaass! More than forty people dying also. . . This year is a very lucky fire.’

. . . the long Bombay evening finally succumbed to warm, star-filled night. By the yellow flickering lamplight we tended to the wounded slum-dwellers, using my first-aid kit as the basis of our little open-air clinic . . . Qasim watched us for a short w left to supervise the erection of emergency shelters, the rationing of remaining water supplies, the preparation of food, and the dozen other tasks that would fill the night to morning and beyond.

Excerpts from Gregory David Robert’s novel ‘Shantaram’ (p160-163)

Illustrations by Esther ten Zijthoff